High capacity hard drive round-up (5TB+6TB)

1. Introduction2. Seagate Enterprise v4 6TB3. Toshiba Nearline Enterprise - 5TB4. Western Digital Red - 6TB5. Performance and Power Comparison Results6. View All Pages

Western Digital Red – 6TB

Product page here. KitGuru news story here.

Western Digital was slow to release a drive with more than 4TB in capacity but in July it finally got there with its 5TB and 6TB Red models. Red drives are intended for the NAS market and Western Digital also has 5TB and 6TB Eco Green drives but has not yet offered these capacities in its Black (Performance) or Purple (Surveillance) ranges.

The fundamental difference between the 6TB Red and the two other drives is that Western Digital has used a 1.2TB platter density so this 6TB drive uses five platters and ten heads. Curiously enough Western Digital tells us that it also uses 1.2TB platters in its 5TB model which suggests five platters and nine heads.

As ever Western Digital is coy about the spin speed of its drives. It is happy to let us know when its performance drives run at 7,200rpm but when it comes to the other models we are told they use IntelliPower. This is taken to mean ‘we don't talk about it but it is slower than 7,200rpm and may vary from one batch of drives to another.'

The standard slow spin speed is 5,400rpm and in the past Seagate has used 5,900rpm in Barracuda LP but according to CrystalDiskInfo the 6TB Red spins at 5,700rpm.

Presumably this is a speed that delivers adequate performance while keeping power draw and heat to a minimum.

Of course that raises the question of what Western Digital considers to be adequate.

You get a flavour of what you can expect as Western Digital has specified 64MB of cache rather than 128MB and the claimed sustained data transfer figure of 175MB/sec is rather lower than the 205MB/sec for Toshiba or 216MB/sec for Seagate.

That's a bold claim as Western Digital will lose about 20 percent performance with the reduced spin speed but clearly aims to recover some of the loss from the increased areal density of its 1.2TB platters.

In HD Tach the Western Digital Red does surprisingly well for a drive with a slow spin speed. The Read figure of 169.4MB/sec is around 80 percent of the Seagate and Toshiba and the burst speed of 432.0MB/sec is very similar to the other two drives. When it comes to write speeds the Western Digital Red suffers as 34.2MB/sec figure is around half the other drives. While that looks bad the fact is that NAS drives need to be able to serve files swiftly and it isn't the end of the world if it takes a while to uploads files to the NAS.

In CrystalDiskMark the Red trails behind the Seagate and Toshiba but just about manages to hang in there.

Iometer tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Western Digital Red. For one thing the preparation cycle took ages as the software slowly but surely fills the drive with a colossal file of data. I didn't run a stopwatch but we are talking about a difference of some hours longer than the 6TB Seagate, presumably as a result of the slower spin speed.

Once Iometer was running the read test was impressive at 168.5 IOPS while the write was fairly dreadful at 38.0 IOPS, which is one third the speed of the Seagate. If you intend to load the Western Digital Red with Movie files and watch them for the rest of your days then it will work admirably but applications with constant writes, such as a surveillance system. will limp along. This illustrates why Western Digital has Purple drives for that very task.

The really telling thing about the test results is that when the 6TB Red was installed in our Synology NAS it performed exactly the same as the Seagate and Toshiba drives, and let's face it, that is the intended task for Western Digital Red.

One area where Western Digital Red excels is the low power draw of 4.7W at idle and 6.5W under load. That is truly impressive.

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Pros:

• 6TB Red has an SRP of £240 and is on sale at £210.
• That works out to 3.8p per GB which is half the price of the Seagate and two thirds of the Toshiba.
• Very low power draw.
• So quiet it is almost silent.

Cons:

• Performance suffers when used as a desktop drive but it is fine in a NAS.
• Warranty is only three years.

KitGuru says: Use Western Digital Red in a NAS as the designers intended and it is a highly competent drive that is absurdly cheap.

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